UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

Browse

Filters

2014 - 20152

Settings

Subject: search.filters.subject.Jewish education

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    'Jew and American in the Making': Education and Childrearing in the American Jewish Community, 1945-1967
    (2015) Furman, Joshua J.; Rozenblit, Marsha; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation examines American Jewish ideas about childhood, parenting, and identity within the context of the aftermath of the Holocaust and the beginning of the Cold War, as a pervasive mood of anxiety about the future direction of American Jewry and its prospects for survival set in among communal leaders. I analyze a wide range of prescriptive literature on American Jewish parenting from psychologists, rabbis, and social workers, as well as Jewish children's magazines and educational materials from religious schools and summer camps. I argue that concerns about antisemitism, intermarriage, and the viability of Jewish life in suburbia drove the need for a philosophy of education and childrearing that prioritized positive experiences and attachments to Judaism and Jewish culture, without inhibiting the transition of Jews and Judaism into mainstream middle-class American life. Building on insights from Kurt Lewin and other Jewish psychologists, as well as Cold War-era notions about the Judeo-Christian origins of American democratic values, rabbis and educators argued that Jewish education should produce not only happy, well-adjusted Jews, but well-informed and loyal American citizens as well. As the first full-length study of American Jewish approaches to education and childrearing after World War II, this project sheds light on important and contested issues in several areas of scholarly interest. It demonstrates the central importance of Kurt Lewin's work to the formulation of the guiding motives and methods that directed Jewish education after 1940. It helps clarify what we know about the nature and extent of Holocaust education in the American Jewish community before the mid-1960s. It offers new perspectives into the process by which American Jews articulated a middle-class identity for themselves that was grounded in both customs and ideas from Jewish tradition as well as contemporary insights found in secular American culture. It also offers a case study for considering how minority groups in an open society such as the United States seek both to integrate themselves into American culture and to preserve their distinctiveness.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Parchment to Touchscreen: Landscape Journey and Experience for 21st Century Learning
    (2014) Silverstein, Joshua Yoshi; Cook, Kelly D.; Plant Science and Landscape Architecture (PSLA); Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Experiences of landscape journey are informed and mitigated by modalities of place-based practices. Historically, documentation and transmission of landscape knowledge was limited to narratives of those with power and influence. Today, the democratization of power and decentralization of knowledge, particularly as affected by technology, are projected to affect powerful changes for our future. This project creates innovation in place-based learning through an interdisciplinary approach combining landscape design for outdoor learning environments with collaborative curriculum development. Educators from Gesher Jewish Day School in Fairfax, VA were involved in this collaboration that has yielded an exciting, fresh approach to engaging student relationships to landscape. Students connect to narratives of landscape journey and experience in Jewish tradition while engaging in guided personal explorations of place. In the process, new wisdom, the "Torah of Place," is generated, documented and transmitted through both traditional sense-of-place activities and pedagogies integrating modern mobile technology such as smartphones and tablets.